Top Five: Ways to Lose Weight Without Dieting

Tipsy blogging.  Dig it, friends.  We’re gonna see how this goes.

So, coming home from the bar, we stopped tonight at White Castle because, come on, it’s drunk food.  I wasn’t drunk, but I was a little happy, I’ll admit it, and I was hungry, and most importantly, I did not feel like cooking.  But my brain nagged at me a little bit.  ”You’re never going to drop that depression weight if you don’t start paying some attention to your eating habits,” my brain told me.  My brain is right, of course.

I am, however, vehemently anti-dieting.  Diets not only do not work, they are psychologically harmful.  I’ve lost weight while not on a diet before, and I’ve kept it off the longest and been the happiest when I wasn’t on “a diet.”  One doesn’t have to count calories or follow the plan in a book to lose weight and get healthy.  So, since I haven’t done a top five in awhile, I thought I’d do my top five ways to get healthy without going on a diet.

1.  Exercise/increased activity

Yeah, I know this is on EVERY FREAKING WEIGHT LOSS LIST and it’s not always fun.  It’s not fun.  But it’s a relatively easy way to drop some pounds if you can get past the mental block of “OMG EXERCISE SUCKS.”  Half an hour a day, most days a week, will be a huge improvement toward better health.  If you can’t abide going to the gym or sitting on a machine for half an hour, find something that you do like, like walking or some kind of sport.  Music or TV while exercising can help a lot.  If you’re at a steady weight (meaning, you’re not really gaining weight), adding exercise can tip the scale back into losing weight.

2.  Get smaller plates, cups, and bowls

Studies have proven that, if you use smaller plates, bowls, and cups, you serve yourself less–and, more importantly, you’re more satisfied with serving yourself less.  To our brains, a plateful is a plateful is a plateful, and unless there is a significant size difference (a saucer vs. a dinner plate, for instance), we’re not going to notice that we have smaller plates, even if we know we bought smaller plates.  If you drink a lot of sugary beverages, investing in smaller glasses is important, too; we serve ourselves more when our container is larger, and we also consume more if we’re served more.

3. Incorporate fresh, and if possible, raw (non-starchy) fruits and vegetables

Raw produce not only contains a lot of really great nutrients for our bodies, but it’s also great calorie-wise; produce is naturally low in calories most of the time (exceptions, like avocados, exist), and raw produce doesn’t have any extra sugar or fat calories added in.  If you don’t naturally love vegetables, don’t worry–don’t force yourself to eat all kinds of stuff that you don’t like.  Pick out the things that you do like and the things that you don’t mind too much–like, if you hate asparagus, but don’t mind broccoli, opt for broccoli and don’t force yourself to eat asparagus.  As you eat more vegetables, you’ll grow more accustomed to them and will like them more.

4. Divide your plate into camps

The rule of thumb for using your plate as a dietary guide is to use half for protein and grain, and the other half for fruit and veg.  This is way easier than counting calories, helps with portion control, and also helps with correct proportions.  (Frankly, since you’re supposed to eat 5-6 servings of grain or something like that, I would probably do like a 40/40/20 split with produce/grain/meat.)  This isn’t quite the same as dieting because you’re not stressing over a calorie count or forbidding yourself to eat whole categories of food; it’s just a guideline to help make your meals balanced and still let you eat the food you like.  Obviously you want to try to balance your choices, even using this system–this wouldn’t work, for example, if your meals of choice were fried chicken, french fries, onion rings, and vegetables tempura.  And, much to my chagrin, macaroni and cheese doesn’t count as a vegetable.

5. Cook at home and develop your cooking repertoire

When you cook at home, you have ultimate control over what goes into your food–that’s a given.  If you don’t know how to cook healthy food or what ingredients to use, though, cooking won’t help.  Healthy food can be delicious; it doesn’t have to be those stupid “light” recipes that use low-calorie substitutions for real food. We often make Mexican-style tacos at home, with fresh tomato salsa, fresh vegetables, and homemade tortillas; these are actually our preferred way of having tacos, not just something we incorporated to be healthier.  Mexican-style tacos don’t use cheese or sour cream, so that takes a lot of the extra calories out; if you use lean meat, that also reduces calories.  Really great dish, and naturally healthy without being “diet” food.  If I order them out, I may or may not get something with a ton of hidden calories; maybe the meat was prepared with a lot of extra fat, or maybe there’s dairy on them, which bumps up the calorie count.

Knowing how to prepare things in a healthier way that is still flavorful helps, too.  Fried chicken is fantastic, but so is chicken sautéed in olive oil, or chicken that has been marinated and grilled.     Baked chicken is not terrible, either (I like to use it in chicken salads and stuff).  The more you know about cooking, the more you’ll be able to put together meals that aren’t calorie-rich but are still so satisfying that you won’t even care that you changed some of your eating habits.

So, those are my tips on how to lose weight without going on a diet.  There are other good ones; making a weekly menu helps me, not buying junk food because I will inevitably eat it all within two days helps, drinking fresh fruit and vegetable juice and smoothies helps.  Not eating processed foods helps a lot.  (And who wants to eat dinner out of a box when you can have a home-cooked meal?  Unless you’re my dad, who prefers box mashed potatoes to fresh, weirdo.)  Incorporating one or all of these tips will have you on the path to a healthy bod without obsessing over what you can and cannot eat.